a pope's words - part 2

From Sept. 5, 2006 The Christian Century this notice: The title of a session in Scotland on Western ignorance of Islam was titled "We don't know Shi'ite."
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The Pope gave a speech/lecture at the University of Regensburg on Sept. 12. The media reported on a minor section of the talk and the Muslim world exploded with vituperation, demands for an apology, rioting, and the murder of an elderly nun. I wrote yesterday of how surreal it all seemed to me.

What adds to the strangeness of it all is the subject matter of the lecture itself. For myself, the Pope seems to exist in a time-warp and a disconnect from the world. We might attribute that to the disconnect expected of an other-worldly mystic. And so it might be. Joseph Ratzinger, however, has not usually been described that way, but rather as an academic-minded theoretician. That would be how I read him.

What makes the talk strange is who the Pope understands his polemical partner(s) to be. He is speaking against a process of de-hellenization that he tracks in the western world through 3 major stages. The first is the Reformation, the 2nd is in liberal theology of the 19th and 20th century, and the last an ongoing stage of the assimilationism inherent (as he sees it) in "cultural pluralism."

Pope Benedict perceives a threat in all of this. But it's not a threat he sees coming from Islam. It's a threat that has been developing, as he sees it, over 500 years in the "west", namely Europe and the Americas. The threat he perceives is to the "catholic" faith, again as he sees it. As a consequence, it is for him a metaphysical threat to the truth claims of Christianity itself.

The issue for Benedict is whether or not Hellenistic ways of thinking are inherent to the gospel and hence inherent to reality itself.

The New Testament was written in Greek and forged in an environment in which Greek thinking was omnipresent if not utterly dominant. The debate had raged in Judaism from the time of the Maccabees over how much Hellenism to allow into Judaism. The result was a back and forth power struggle stretching through 100's of years and thousands of violent deaths. Peace was forged in that debate with the rise of the rabbis in the post-Temple period.

The New Testament reflects some of the debate from a Christian perspective with the tension between Paul's version of the gospel and James' (or even Peter's) vision. The debate was ultimately answered in Paul's favor, though only in post-New Testament times. Hellenism won.

The rabbis and Christians took different paths in post-New Testament times. The rabbis could appropriate Hellenistic thinking when that suited them, but they could also adopt Babylonian ways or Egyptian, then later eastern European. Christianity proceeded to appropriate a variety of cultural influences through the centuries, but kept its primary allegiance to the hellenism reflected in the New Testament. Only in recent centuries has Christianity been able to be self-critical in appraising these developments. The result is the "threat" that the pope sees in efforts to "dehellenize" the New Testament and Christianity.

One can sense the high degree of abstract thinking going on in this lecture by the way Benedict equates without explanation Platonism and Cartesianism, 2 philosophical traditions with nearly 2,000 years separating them. The equation is intriguing, and perhaps the pope has written of it elsewhere. But he sees no need to reference that in his talk.

His conclusion as he puts it is a critique of modern reason "from within." But he claims not to be arguing for some kind of magical return to a time before the Renaissance and the Reformation, a mythical ideal time. But it seems to me that claim follows the familiar pattern of "Yes, but ..." While outwardly saying yes, the speaker is really saying "no."

Pope Benedict seems to want a return to a time that never was, when reason (logos) was recognized as central to God's creation, when understanding and dialogue could transpire between people who disagreed, precisely because they both acknowledged that reason was the final arbiter.

He looks out on a world where reason is not recognized as the final arbiter, where understanding one another is not experienced as a high priority, where getting one's way is. The Muslim reactivity to the Pope's remarks seems to be a wonderful illustration of this pervasive reality in our world. The realistic expectation is that these forces are only going to become more destructive than they have already proven to be. Not a pretty sight.

Benedict is trying to argue against these developments. And I applaud him for that. But he is so far removed from the world in which I live and the reality which I perceive that his words are nearly meaningless. (Worth killing a nun over?) Even from the vantage point of an Anglican with some connections to Roman Catholic influences, I can see that Benedict's own church is vastly more than the one that he seems to live in.

It all seems so strange. But a wonderful illustration of the power of words and their elusive nature. Thank you.